The Predator Editor

It has become common now to blame John Campbell and his clique of writers for many of the long-standing evils affecting the genre of science fiction. But as the crazy years of the 1970s showed, Campbell has no monopoly on the ruin of the genre. He wasn't even the first to set American science fiction's course. And at least he paid his authors.

I had long known about pulp writers' valid complaints about Hugo Gernsback and his miserly approach to payments. But thanks to a tip from Deuce at The Swords of Robert E. Howard board, I learned the effect Gernsback's greed had on the writing in the genre.

Darrell Schweitzer's "Why Stanley G. Weinbaum Still Matters" (found in his The Threshold of Forever: Essays and Reviews) begins by describing a low point of quality in imaginative fiction already in place in the 1920s. The usual suspects earn their blame, including a rise in Realism as being the only real literature. Then:

"...things got worse when the first product actually marketed as science fiction was Hugo Gernsback's Amazing Stories, which began with the April 1926 issue. In orthodox fannish histories, this event is called 'the birth of science fiction.' The truth is a lot more complicated."

First, a little background.

"Gernsback was a strange combination of visionary, entrepreneur, incompetent, and crook. He was the first person to see some use for what he originally called "scientifiction" as educational pro-science propaganda, and he figured out how to market it. Unfortunately, he simply was not a literary person at all, and seems to have been completely insensitive to what we would today call 'literary value.' He also did not believe in paying his writers except, all too often, under threat of lawsuit. [...] How did Gernsback treat [H. P. Lovecraft]? He paid him, reluctantly, well after publication, a fifth of a cent a word, a rate so insulting that before long HPL and all his circle referred to Gernsback as 'Hugo the Rat.'"

You can imagine the effect that this had on authors.

"Unsurprisingly, the real pros, the top science fiction writers of the day, such as Ray Cummings, Murrary Leinster, Ralph Milne Farley, and A. Merrit, may have been reprinted in Gernsback's various publications, but they did not write original stories for him. Who wanted a fifth of a cent on threat of lawsuit when Argosy paid one to two cents a word on acceptance, very reliably? This was the same Gernsback who reprinted many stories by H. G. Wells until he stiffed Wells once too often and lost him as a contributor. 

"The result was that the actual science fiction magazines, Amazing and Wonder Stories particularly, were a backwater in science fiction."

Not only did Gernsback thus form the science fiction ghetto of genre, the literary quality of the stories tanked.

"Most of the non-reprint content of the early Amazing was decidedly non-pulp. The writers did not have--or need--the routine storytelling skills required by, say, a western or adventure story magazine."

Here Schweitzer uses pulp as a synonym for professional.

When spoiled by the bounty of Weird Tales, it is easy to view Asimov's various stabs at pulp writing as the sort of chest-pounding self-promotion at the expense of the past that we've come to expect from science fiction. But after a decade of works like "The Electric Duel" preceding the Campbelline Revolution, perhaps there's a bit more truth in his claims.

Gernback's greed ghettoized science fiction away from mainstream adventure fiction, ran out the popular and talented writers, leaving only the amateurs who would write for little to nothing at all. And it's from these leavings that the first fans and conventions welled up. I can now understand the almost religious reverence given Astounding. Even before Campbell, the magazine paid more and demanded more from its writers, and served as a refuge for fans from the dreck. The problem is, Astounding was a ghetto within a ghetto, and no more the mainstream of science fiction as was Amazing.

Perhaps if Gernsback wasn't such a rat, some of the vitality and mainstream presence of science fiction might have been preserved. Unfortunately, he chose to beggar his writers while lining his pockets, and he loved writers too new and too poor to find a lawyer.

The 1970s Sci Fi Cargo Cult

1980 is often used as a dividing line between the time when a reader could pick up a rocketship book and expect science fiction and the time when he could pick up a rocketship book and get...something...else. The year comes up repeatedly, whether in comments on the Castalia House blog or through talk of Appendix N by Jeffro Johnson and others. Various explanations get thrown about as to the changes, from Star Wars to Lord of the Rings to the Thor Power Tools case. Often, the specter of New Wave is invoked, taking the blame for the loss in reader trust and diminished sales. But the 1970s were science fiction's Crazy Years, and key trends get hidden in the unceasing march of deaths, cancellations, lawsuits, and blockbusters that reshaped the genre.

Prior to the 1970s, short fiction was the favored form of science fiction. Collected in magazine, these short stories were edited by a revolving door of writers turned editors, such as Campbell, Pohl, and Bova. With Campbell as a notable exception, these editors would return to writing afterwards. It also meant that the body of science fiction was building off of or reacting against a tradition of science fiction established during the pulps. Even as the actual pulps vanished, science fiction writers from Bester and Moorcock to Farmer and Zelazny continued to work with characters and ideas from the pulp age. 

However, in the 1970s, short fiction was replaced by the novel as the dominant medium. But instead of the writers and magazine editors shifting over into the book editors slots, a new generation of editors took over that had:

"little reading background in science fiction prior to their assumption of their posts, none of them have ever written it. (The central editors of previous decades were all writers or people who had at least attempted to write in the field.) They have a scant background in the field and for many of them (again, not all) science fiction editing is a way station, an apprentice position on the way to editing something, anything, other than science fiction."

Malzberg, Barry N.. Breakfast in the Ruins (Kindle Locations 2967-2970). Baen Books. Kindle Edition. 

These were the editors of which as early as 1968 jokes were made that they thought the genre was invented by Harlan Ellison, a criticism that would continue to be made in 1981:

(to most contemporary science fiction editors "modern" science fiction began with Harlan Ellison, and they have only the most superficial acquaintance with the work of the forties, fifties, and even nineteen-sixties)

Malzberg, Barry N.. Breakfast in the Ruins (Kindle Locations 2979-2980). Baen Books. Kindle Edition. 

Because of this, the book editors tended "to publish what looks like science fiction" as opposed to what was truly science fiction. And, since they were risk adverse, or, at the very least, fearful of making mistakes, there was a great narrowing of the field, rendering it a "minor subdivision of Pillage & Homogenize, Inc., presided over in almost all cases by the same group of people." (Malzberg)

"Most science fiction editors seem mostly to seek the assurance that they are doing nothing wrong and since I cannot grant them this assurance I stay away from most of them." 

Samuel R. Delany, The Jewel-Hinged Jaw: Notes of the Language of Science Fiction.

This shift in gatekeepers from fans and writers to ticket-punching careerists gutted science fiction of its pulp and Campbell traditions, a loss apparent to the old hands as early as 1981. By publishing what looked liked science fiction instead of the previous mainstream of science fiction, they were no different than the cargo cultists of World War 2. And the readers who were served imitation science fiction instead of the real deal left in droves.

The Worst is Yet To Come

Author Earnings recently released their statistics for 2016 book sales. As industry hands and book reading fans poured over the results, one of the more interesting facts is that science fiction sold the least of all the major categories. This is not a surprise to those who have been following the shrinking sales of the Big Five in this category, although it is still unwelcome. Unfortunately, the worst is yet to come.

A survey of modern science fiction shows a repeated pattern of extinction events. In the 1950s, the pulps died. At the end of the Crazy Years of the 1970s, magazines died as the primary medium of science fiction and backlists died. The 1990s and early 2000s killed off the midlist writer. And, as the same old song plays of magazine sales drying up, rumors of publisher woes, and publisher wisdom telling authors that science fiction cannot sell, we stand on the verge of the next great crash for the genre. That this crash is happening in the 2020s and not in the 2010s is due to the 1990s' publish woes lasting into the 2000s, pushing back the date of the upcoming crash.

Each crash came about at the intersection of a change in the publishing industry and soft sales. The pulps failed as digest and women's magazines grew profitable. The novel grew ascendant in the 1970s, and changes in tax laws made backlists a tax burden. Reliance on Bookscan and other sales tools sent publishers looking for blockbuster bestsellers instead of growing their midlist writers. And, in the current day, ebooks are proving just as disruptive, with more than 80% of all 2016 sales coming from ebooks according to Author Earnings. But while writers cannot control the changes in the industry, they can at least avoid the mistake that repeatedly led to soft sales:

Realism.

This is not the same thing as factual accuracy. The crunch of accuracy is not even a hallmark of science fiction. Rather, the realism described here is the literary realism as that ushered in by William Dean Howells, who

...proscribed writing about “interesting” characters–such as famous historical figures or creatures of myth. He decried exotic settings–places such as Rome or Pompeii, and he denounced tales that told of uncommon events. He praised stories that dealt with the everyday, where “nobody murders or debauches anybody else; there is no arson or pillage of any sort; there is no ghost, or a ravening beast, or a hair-breadth escape, or a shipwreck, or a monster of self-sacrifice, or a lady five thousand years old in the course of the whole story.” He denounced tales with sexual innuendo. He said that instead he wanted to publish stories about the plight of the “common man,” just living an ordinary existence.

This avoidance of the fantastic, the exotic, and the sensational is directly opposed to the spirit of science fiction, to the extension of an idea into a speculation of the unknown. However, literary realism became the primary philosophy of literary fiction, and every attempt by science fiction to become more literary has also included a fascination with realism. And realism tanks sales of fantastic literature. For example, when Campbelline writer Babette Rosmund took over the editorialship of The Shadow Magazine in 1946, she introduced changes to the stories that fell in line with the realism en vogue with the new generation of pulp editors:

While the writing in this new pulp was palatable, the major problem was that The Shadow no longer existed in it. Instead, Lamont Cranston became the hero, solving mysteries with the police. All hints of a secret identity were ignored. The Shadow lost all his superhuman qualities. His guns remained holstered, his laugh rarely pealed across the pages. Removed were the cast of supporting characters and the villains. The agents and the gadgets. The Shadow's laugh and his blazing 45's.

Under her direction away from the fantastic and exotic elements that were essential to making the Shadow, "the magazine fell back to bimonthly and then to quarterly as sales continued to fall." 

In science fiction, every instance of pre-crash sales slumps can be traced to the rise of realism. Campbell introduced realism in science fiction and fantasy, a change which the Futurians accelerated in the 1940s and 1950s as they attempted to wag the dog of science fiction and fandom to shift it more to the left. In the 1960s, both New Wave and its opponents experimented with forms of realism, until in the 1970s, well after the original New Wave had ended, the old guard decided to out New Wave the New Wave. The 1990s crash corresponded with another flirtation with literary realism, as Kristine Kathryn Rusch relates:

This is the reason that science fiction as a publishing category nearly died off in the 1990s. Things have improved a lot in this century, but that doesn’t help the perception that the writers who toiled in the successful, but less accepted, subgenres didn’t exist at all.

I mention the literary part of the genre because it held its strongest sway in the short fiction categories. It’s easier to maintain a magazine with literary pretentions than it is to maintain a book line with the same attitudes. A lot of sf book lines died in the late 1990s and early 2000s. Some magazines, including the one that I used to edit, lost a vast amount of readership when those literary attitudes I just mentioned took over at the turn of this century.

The current plunge coincides with the uptick of realism brought in by intersectional politics, which seeks to impose a narrower grade of realism on the genre, as instead of a common man, these writers explore the plights of specific and numerically smaller minorities. What might start as the examination of the plight of the common man gets pushed aside for the common woman who gets pushed aside for the common Hispanic woman who in turn gets pushed aside for an even smaller minority subset. And the sales continue to fall, and publishing continues to writhe with the changes caused by ebooks. The worst yet to come.

Yet Kristine Kathryn Rusch shows the way out of the upcoming crash:

On the other hand, some of the sf magazines grew in circulation. For example, Asimov’s Science Fiction grew in overall circulation after Sheila Williams became editor. She got rid of a lot of the slipstream fiction (the stuff you couldn’t tell from realistic fiction) and purchased a lot of space opera and adventure fiction.

Embrace the fantastic and the exotic. Embrace adventure. These are the key to sales in science fiction, and the shelter from the upcoming storm, just as they brought science fiction out of its previous crashes. Don't make the same mistake that drove hundreds of writers out of the field. Avoid realism.

Accuracy vs. Realism in Science Fiction

As Campbell and Pulp supporters squared off over recent posts critical of Campbell writers, I wanted to dive deeper into what exactly was inside the Campbell revolution that Pulp was rejecting. Hard SF has been around since Verne, Poe, and even Kepler, so it could not have been the accuracy required by Campbell that is the cause of contention. Looking at Campbell's fantasy magazine Unknown/Unknown Worlds and one of his protege's attempts to turn the Shadow into Shadow Mystery, I noticed a trend away from the heroic to the everyday, as literary realism became more prevalent. It was also literary realism which the Futurians embraced at the end of the Campbelline Age, giving birth to the assumption that science fiction must contain social commentary.

I posted my first attempt to write this up at the Castalia House blog:

On the current Campbel/Pulp argument: 

1/ Mulling over the difference between accuracy and realism. The drive to make a story better fit science, geography, or culture is a long-standing tradition, seen in the pulps, in Verne, and even earlier. It is possible to be fantastic and accurate, as the Shadow and Louis L’Amour show… 

2/ Realism, however, is the idea that only the stories of the everyman and that only everyday and banal activities and experiences are worth writing about. This idea is anathema to any sort of fantastic literature. The adoption of this idea, typically in 20 year cycles, has driven down sales in sff. 

3/ PulpRev has recently come under fire by Campbell fans for its criticism of Campbell writers. It is not the accuracy of the Campbell writers we object to, but the realism of those writers. That realism allowed more fanatical realists – such as the Futurians – to enter the genre… 

4/ It is this increasing drive toward realism that it is the source of SFF’s current woes. Almost every major reaction against Campbelline writing is a step further towards realism, further away from heroes and great deeds. Oddly enough, it is the accuracy of the Campbells that the realists protest. 

5/ There is room under the Pulp umbrella for the accuracy of Campbell-style writing. There is no room in fantastic literature for realism.

Fortunately, Misha Burnett chose to answer:

I see your point, I think, regarding accuracy and realism, although I would probably define the words a bit differently than you do. 

What you are calling accuracy I would call consistency, and would divide it into internal and external consistency. 

It’s external consistency that the Futurians were hung up on–they wanted stories in which Mars was described they way that the current astronomical theories described Mars. From a standpoint of internal consistency, however, it doesn’t matter is Burrough’s Barsoom resembles modern theories of the conditions on Mars, what matters is that the dead sea bottoms of Barsoom are always dead sea bottoms, and we don’t suddenly encounter an ocean of liquid water when going from Helium to Thark. 

Regarding what you call realism, I think the issue is even more complex. I don’t believe that ordinary people and their quotidian concerns are incompatible with either the fantastic or the heroic. 

In fact, I would say that the defense of the banal activities and experiences of ordinary life is the basis of heroism. Frodo and Sam were not fighting for a life of adventure, they were in Mordor precisely because they wanted the Shire to remain quiet and simple.
I think that the issue you take exception to is not the inclusion of ordinary people in adventure literature, but rather the assumption that “ordinary” perforce means the lowest common denominator. 

I personally believe that heroes are just ordinary people who have found themselves in extraordinary situations and have found it in themselves to rise to the occasion, and that great deeds are generally preformed in defense of a life filled with banal and ordinary.

Iron sharpens iron, and it is what Misha is calling external consistency that best explains the idea of accuracy I was searching for. And his comments about the nature of heroism are important to mull over. It is not the exaltation of the lowly in realism that is anathema to fantastic literature, but the idea that only the mundane, the lowly, and the everyday is worthy of literature. Realism as a literary movement excludes heroism, assumes that great men do not exist, reducing everything to determinism.. Realism, as a movement, seeks to eliminate the fantastic entirely. Realism is often seen as despair.

It is not the accuracy or the external consistency of the Campbelline Age which I have a problem with; rather it is the determinism, the despair, and the assumption that only Campbelline style works are legitimate fiction that I see as the founding mistake of modern science fiction.

*****

Don't forget, Three for Three on Friday.

A View of The Crazy Years

A recently republished Poul Anderson interview from 1975 sheds some light on the state of publishing in the 1970s:

TANGENT: What do you think of the pulps, now that they are all but dead?

ANDERSON: Well, the pulp magazines are dead, and the magazine field generally is in a bad way. But I’d say that the old-fashioned pulp novel at least is flourishing as well as ever. It seems they’ve moved over into the paperback books.

But, now, obviously the more markets there are from a writer’s viewpoint the better, not only from a pecuniary viewpoint, but the more activity there is going on, the more vitality there will be in any given field, and the more chance for people to experiment and find new directions and so on. So, yes, I certainly regret the shrinkage of the short story market on such grounds.

TANGENT: What about the short story anthology as a replacement?

ANDERSON: To some extent they’re stepping in to fill that need, but the fact is though, that for whatever reason, by and large, short story collections don’t sell as well as novels. Evidently fewer readers wish to buy a short story collection.

TANGENT: What do you think of the cycles and trends in science fiction, if they exist at all?

ANDERSON: Well, I think Algis Budrys put it very well once—a passing remark in a review or something: ‘Trends are for second-raters.’ There seems to be an occasional bandwagon, but what really happens is somebody has come along and broken new ground, done something original, and it’s worth exploring, you know, so naturally we all get interested—a lot of us try ourselves out in it too. But as far as making that an all-time direction or something, that is only what people incapable of originality would do. The originators, the ground breakers, they’ve gone on to something else.

I think, basically, that Jim Baen is right in his new direction. Not that there should be any declared moratorium on down-beat stories, but it does look as if that theme has been pretty well worked out, for the time being at least. What new disasters can you think of that haven’t already been done? (Laughs) You get these cycles, you know, about ten years or so ago, there was such a rash of stories, about psionics especially, and we all got sick of ‘psi’, and about ten years before that there’d been such a rash of anti-utopian things, especially bad imitations of The Space Merchants. I at least got the feeling that if I read one more of those I’d have to go and throw up.

Reading this interview, smack in the middle of the 1970s, further cements some of the impressions of the time I got after read Malzberg's Breakfast in the Ruins.  Starting with the death of John W. Campbell in 1971 and ending with the Thor Power case in 1979, science fiction publishing was getting hammered again and again.

John Campbell's death in 1971 extinguished a guiding light for the genre.  Campbell continued as a magazine editor for years after the age bearing his name had passed, only stopping when they laid his body to rest.  Evidence of his continuing influence can be seen in Anderson's interview, as Campbell coined the term "psionics" and promoted the idea, beyond the point of saturation into hoary cliche, a good ten years after "The Cold Equations" murdered the Campbelline Age.  When Campbell passed, a friend of Barry Malzberg remarked, "The field has lost its conscience, its center, the man for whom we were all writing. Now there's no one to get mad at us anymore."  

Campbell's death also coincided with another collapse of the short fiction market. Science fiction as a short fiction market had survived the death of the pulps in the 1950s, and continued through the 1960s as the main voice in the great conversation between science fiction writers. But changing times, and yet another swing towards the literary, had run short fiction sales into the ground. While some of the magazines survived, even to this day, they no longer held the prominence once held in the 1940s, 1950s, and 1960s. The novel took its place. But as the Anderson interview shows, the short novel format of the pulps, 40,000-60,000 words, and science fiction serials, including translations of international series like Perry Rhodan, flourished for a time.

A change of the guard in editors accompanied the shift from magazines to books. Magazine editors tended to be active writers with a connection to the history of the genre. Even though many Golden Age and New Wave writers looked down on their pulp forebears, they were also involved in translating these works into new media, such as television, movies, and graphic novels. However, the book editors were university graduates, without an understanding of the history of the genre. From his vantage point in 1980, Malzberg derisively pointed out for many of the newer editors, their understanding of the genre only began with the books of Harlan Ellison. This would put works from before 1958 outside of their frame of reference, including the pulps, the Campbelline era, and even much of the Golden Age stories. As the new gatekeepers, the book editors would select works that reflected their vision of the genre; one that had been divorced from science fiction's past. And, since short story anthologies did not sell, there was little incentive for editors to familiarize themselves with the short works of the pulps, Campbells, and Golden Age.

As books took over, so too did the economics of the book market. Publishers made more money off of larger books, so the length of the average novel grew, first to 80,000 words, then to 100,000 and beyond. This trend continues to this day, with TOR bragging about creating new book binding technology to handle the 400,000 words of Brandon Sanderson's Words of Radiance as recent as 2014. The pulp novel format, with its shorter length, was not as cost-effective as the longer stories. Nor could multiple pulp novels be easily combined into a single volume. So newer works written to the longer formats were favored over the old. Even the international serials, which evolved from the pulp formats, fell victim to this trend.

Much has been written of the two black swans of 1977; Star Wars and the epic fantasy explosion. Both represented a sea change in the type of stories readers demanded, representing types of stories that publishers had not been offering before. Preference shifted away from the works of the Golden Age and the New Wave, from the dystopias of the early 70s to more hopeful adventures. Epic fantasy also contributed to the growing word counts of the novel.

Finally, in early 1979, the Supreme Court announced its decision on Thor Power Tool Company vs. Commissioner, essentially rewriting the tax code covering inventories. This made the extensive backlists held in publishers' warehouses a liability. Almost overnight, the publishers pulped thousands of titles, effectively killing off the backlists including a large number of older titles. SFWA and many writers see this as the act that caused the divorce between science fiction and its past. However, it is better understood as the final blow in a series of calamities.

Given the turmoil of the decade, even more trends and events leading to the transformation of science fiction and fantasy may be discovered. However, it is clear from Malzberg that the world of science fiction in 1980 was fundamentally different from the world of science fiction in 1970, and he was uncertain if the changes were for the better. Anderson sheds a little light on the progress of various changes already well under way in 1975.

A Short History of Exclusion in SF

Rather than sense of wonder, the primary virtue of mainstream science fiction has been exclusion, or a continued winnowing of topics and media from the writer's toolkit.

***

1935 - Weird Tales readers revolt against the inclusion of Dr. Satan, an anti-hero with mystical and scientific powers in the vein of the Shadow and Doc Savage.  Excluded from science fiction are the hero pulps.

1937 - John Campbell takes over as editor of Astounding Science Fiction, ushering in the era that would bear his name.  In the drive to root science fiction in plausibility, planetary romance and space opera are excluded from mainstream science fiction.

Early 1950 -  The Futurians attempt their revolt in the desire to move science fiction readership and fandom to the Left.  Their stories championed science fiction as a vehicle to examine social issues, typically at the society level instead of the personal.  Excluded from their science fiction are engineering and heroism.

1960s - The New Wave movement attempted to raise literary quality through the use of soft science fiction.  During this time, a section of the movement attempted to rename the genre to speculative fiction.  Rather that attempting to reunite science fiction, fantasy, and horror into a weird tales genre, these writers instead excluded science itself from science fiction.

1970s - This decade might be called the Crazy Years of publishing.  Through a perfect storm of market forces and legal rulings, the short fiction market, where mainstream science fiction was birthed and once thrived, was replaced by books as the vehicle for science fiction's great conversation.  From now on, short fiction is effectively excluded from the mainstream of science fiction thought.

2000s - Patrick Nielsen Hayden, an editor at TOR, claims that there are too many libertarians in science fiction and seeks to correct this through promoting Left-leaning authors.  Unless you are lucky enough to write for Baen, conservative values and ideas are excluded from science fiction.

2004 - Mundane Science Fiction publishes a manifesto that seeks to remove all speculative technologies from the stories, reducing them to Howells's idea of "stories about the plight of the 'common man,' just living an ordinary existence" but keeping times, technologies, and settings to an immediate near-future.  Mundanes removed any flight of fancy or speculation or even future from science fiction.

2014 - Social Justice Advocates beat the diversity drum, promoting the buying of stories from women, American racial minorities, and the minorities of sexuality.  In doing so, they insist that stories must also include said minorities and that readers should stop reading books for white men.  If, by accident of birth, you are white, straight, or male, you are excluded from science fiction. 

***

What techniques and topics are left to build a sense of wonder with? 

What Happened to Fun?

From Sarah Hoyt:

Which means to excellently educated people, including those who don’t consciously buy into the Marxist vision, finding these “markers” in a book makes the book “good.”  The most piteous tragedy of the oppressed woman is instructional and therefore can be enjoyed, and in fact MUST be enjoyed, even if you doze multiple times in the course of reading it, and end up downing three pots of coffee just to finish the novel… and even if you sometimes don’t finish the novel.  You know these are novels your literature professors would approve of, and therefore are sure it is a “good” book. 

This vision collides at a fundamental level with that most of the Sad Puppies supporters have.  THAT vision is that reading is a ludic endeavor.  It exists to be enjoyed.  We are not interested in whether it advances the cause of social progress, the cause of social retrogress or no cause at all.  We don’t believe that the purpose of literature is to be useful, but to be enjoyed. 

We think “good” in a novel or story depends on how deeply it moves us, how much it stays with us, what impact it has on us and our life.

That reading is something that is to be enjoyed may not seem like such a controversial statement, but for almost 150 years, the idea has come under attack.  These critics insist that there must be some other good to writing.  In most cases, this other good has a political end to it.  The Futurians and their heirs, when pushing for a more social minded science fiction before trying to write science fiction without any science to it, follow the tradition of William Dean Howells, editor of the Atlantic Monthly in the 1870s.

Howells crusaded against the fantastic.  In "On Writing as a Fantasist", Dave Wolverton tells how:

[Howells] proscribed writing about “interesting” characters–such as famous historical figures or creatures of myth. He decried exotic settings–places such as Rome or Pompeii, and he denounced tales that told of uncommon events. He praised stories that dealt with the everyday, where “nobody murders or debauches anybody else; there is no arson or pillage of any sort; there is no ghost, or a ravening beast, or a hair-breadth escape, or a shipwreck, or a monster of self-sacrifice, or a lady five thousand years old in the course of the whole story.” He denounced tales with sexual innuendo. He said that instead he wanted to publish stories about the plight of the “common man,” just living an ordinary existence. 

Howells did so because "he was a socialist, and he was trying to encourage–nay, dare I say bribe–other authors into writing propaganda for him."  Rather than making his proscriptions based on "how literature really worked; he tried instead to make it serve his political agenda."  And in serving agenda first, reading could no longer be about fun, but about message.  

Since Howells edited the Atlantic Monthly, one of the highest paid markets for fiction, his views quickly spread through the American writing community.  Appealing to his prejudices became the gateway to a payday, and the prestige of the Atlantic Monthly set the expectations of the high end market from that point on.  It is no accident that the writers of the exotic and the fantastic found their home in the pulps, and not the more prestigious and lucrative slicks.  Howells's editorial descendants left no other place for such tales.  They promoted message and propaganda with money and prestige.  And so the idea that reading is fun got regulated to a guilty pleasure.  In these days, 150 years removed from Howells, where the foes of escapism would deem every book you read a political act and a vector for a political disease message, mere enjoyment is now a sin.

From Campbell to the Futurians, New Wave to sf as speculative fiction, and Minimalism to the current push for Great Social Justice, every literary movement in science fiction that attempted to gain some of the prestige of the literary mainstream has done it by excluding elements of the fantastic from the writer's palette.  Each of these movements has also attempted to move the viewpoints of readers and fandom towards a given political goal.  Despite being a genre in declared pursuit of the sense of wonder, it has repeatedly needed to relearn that before you can educate, you first must entertain. This idea, expressed most recently by various Sad Puppies, has been voiced before, including by New Wave author Harlan Ellison, thirty, forty, and even fifty years prior.  Yet every time science fiction forgets about fun in the pursuit of propaganda, print sales have dropped, as they are doing now.

So once again, we must learn the basics of writing, starting with the first lesson:

Fiction is supposed to be fun.

Questions for Investigation

I've been using my Google+ account as a scratch pad lately, thinking out loud about a few half-formed ideas. So that I can keep better track of them, and also in hopes that someone might batter the errors out of them, I've posted them here.

***

Did science fiction survive the death of Campbell in 1971?

By science fiction, I mean the branch of stories written for, against, in reaction to, or grew out from the Campbell revolution. I'd include, at the very least, Campbell, Futurian, and New Wave. Other rocketship stories exist outside of this group, but, unlike the Campbell strain of science fiction, they aren't typically considered to be the legitimate bearers of the mantle of SF.

There is no one smoking gun for what killed off a lot of weird literature in the 1970s, from new tax structures making backlists liabilities to the death of fiction magazines to rising pagecounts and an explosion of epic fantasy driving publishers away from the shorter weird tales. The newer editors of the 70s did not have their roots in the weird pulps and magazines either. But Campbell's death was mourned, not only for the loss of the man, but, as writer Barry Malzberg recounted of a friend's reaction to Campbell's death, "The field has lost its conscience, its center, the man for whom we were all writing. Now there's no one to get mad at us anymore."

Did Campbell science fiction survive this time, or was it supplanted by other rocketship tales in the 70s, as epic fantasy replaced sword and sorcery and the summer blockbuster replaced the dour artistic films of the same time? My gut now says no, but had I listened to my gut, I would have thought Campbell science fiction to be a more universal literature instead of being a literature of a clique. But while I might not yet have proof for a hunch, I am interested in hanging the pinyata out there for others to whack away at it.

In response, Jeffro Johnson pointed out that:

Something was out of whack when Asimov came backfrom nonfiction to do alien masturbation and low gee awkward sex. Heinlein was doing mega-novels about a guy traveling in time to have sex with his mom. Clarke? You know what he was doing in Sri Lanka and "Childhoods End" takes on an entirely different meaning because of it. These guys define the field for most people... these guys are what reformers are trying to move back to... but I'm telling you, this is batshit crazy stuff. If you think of this crap displacing Burroughs, Merritt, Brackett, Vance, Wellman, and Williamson, it's just plain bizarre.

And, indeed, Asimov and Heinlein's old man phases started after Campbell's death...

***

When did the idea that the pre-Campbell weird tales and the pulps suck become common?

I have a hard time believing that it was prevalent during the 30s through the early 70s. Many of the early Campbell writers were friends with Lovecraft and his Mythos circle. Others wrote for Weird Tales and similar non-Campbell pulps even as they wrote for Campbell. In fact, working in the pulps was a tradition that lasted decades. Kuttner wrote his own hero pulp. Bester wrote for the Shadow radio plays and even turned a Shadow script into the Demolished Man. Farmer wrote Tarzan novels and a fannish account of Doc Savage. Delaney wrote Fafhrd and the Grey Mouser stories for the comics.

Outside the pulps, Moorcock was Lester Dent's greatest disciple, using the Doc Savage author's pulp form and structure to create his early fantasies. Even Harlan Ellison used hero pulp radio plays to unironically convey the innocence of childhood in his stories.

Was it introduced by the anti-heroic Futurians? Or did the attitude arise after the 1970s, when the book editors took over from the magazine editors and no longer knew of the pulps or the magazines? Whenever it entered fannish thought, it created a lingering bit of "common knowledge" that just ain't so.

Observations on Weird Tales

***

I have been listing to recordings of various panels from Pulpfest, a convention for pulp enthusiasts and collectors.  While the convention focuses more on the hero pulps like Doc Savage and the Shadow, a groups of panels focused specifically on the horror, fantasy, and science fiction pulps that birthed the modern genres, Appendix N, and gaming of all stripes.  The king of these pulps was Weird Tales.

Writers who got their start in this magazine include H. P. Lovecraft, Clark Ashton Smith, Robert Bloch, Robert E. Howard, Tennessee Williams, Edmund "World Wrecker" Hamilton, Ray Bradbury, Manly Wade Wellman, Fritz Leiber, Henry Kuttner. C. L. Moore, Theodore Sturgeon, Margaret St. Clair, and August Derlith. Weird Tales published or had the right of first refusal to a majority of Appendix N authors and works, with most of the exceptions writing before or after the magazine's run. It represents the foundational pulp magazine against which the other horror, fantasy, and science fiction pulps reacted. Initially, these magazines would pick up stories rejected by the whims of Farnsworth Wright. Later, in Joseph Campbell and the Futurian editors, they would reject Weird Tales' pulp sensibilities for the frontiers of hard SF and social SF. Over time, it is those styles of pulp fiction, championed by NYC publishers and fan clubs like the Futurians and the Hydra Club, which claimed to be the mainstream of science fiction and the Golden Age. However, the shadow cast upon genre fiction by Weird Tales reaches to the present day:

"To this day, all horror writers take something out of somebody in Weird Tales. Whether it be Clive Barker or Steven King, who is very vocal about his admiration for it. Any of them you can name - Dean Koontz - they all received their education from Weird Tales. Think of Weird Tales as the doctoral thesis you have to read to enter the college." - Frank Schildiner 

I also noticed that Weird Tales and many of its authors were centered around Chicago instead of New York City. It is curious that these Chicago authors, without links to NYC fandom circles, were the ones who have slid into obscurity, just like pulpier Campbellian writers outside that clique have as well.

Finally, meet the character that was too pulp even for Weird Tales: Doctor Satan. A villain in the vein of Fu Manchu or Fantomas, he reled on a mixture of science and the occult to aid his crimes. Unfortunately, it was the readership, not the editors, who forced Weird Tales to cancel his stories, as they did not want to read hero pulp stories in Weird Tales. This might be one of the first anti-pulp revolts in the history of science fiction and fantasy. With a readership one-sixth of hero pulps like Doc Savage or The Shadow, Weird Tales was eager to please its audience, which was writing to the magazine and pledging to cancel their subscriptions. This revolt certainly precedes Campbell's revolution by a couple years. A suspicious soul might even wonder if New York fandom voices were loud in that tumult, just like they were in later anti-pulp movements.

Anti-Pulp Revolutions

A history of the counter-revolutions to Campbell, each anti-pulp in nature.  I am not endorsing the comments on the pulps or the hagiography to hard sf. However, I do find it curious that all the counter-revolutions were in the same anti-heroic direction and not towards the pulps. Notice that the first, the Futurians, was a sizable faction of WorldCon fandom at the time as well as a sizable fraction of the editorial gatekeepers of the time, editing up to half of the pulp magazines on the 40s at one time. 

Jeffro was wondering who killed the pulps, leaning towards Campbell.  I'm leaning instead towards to the Futurians, who did drive the pulpier of the Campbell authors out of the spotlight and into obscurity.  The insistence on Literature with Meaning is common to Socialist authors, having been first expressed in the 1890s, and the Futurians were all card-carrying believers in that anti-civilization pipe dream.  Jeffro has suggested 1940 as the year when the wheels fell off of science fiction, which would coincide with the rise of the Futurians as an editorial force.  Now, we might both be right, as there is overlap between Campbell's authors and the Futurians, most notably in Asimov.  If I am right, though, Worldcon fandom has been a blight on the genre since its inception.